"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut"
is often attributed to Anonymous, but it was actually written by
H. L. Chase. He was a professor of French at Miami University in
Oxford, Ohio, retired in 1965, and now is living in Cincinnati.
He is in his eighties. I talked to him by phone about the story
of the story.

"I wrote it about 1940. It
was going to be part of a little article I was writing. It was in
the days of rationing during the war and I thought about what
would happen if we had to ration language. If our vocabulary were
cut in half, we'd have to get along with other words.
Consequently, I thought I'd see how you'd get along with the
other half. I've never written that article, but I've always
thought of doing it.

"I taught French, and I used
the story in my class to show the importance of intonation in
learning a foreign language. You see, if you take these English
words and put them in columns like a spelling book and just read
them, they have no meaning. However, if you read them with the
proper intonation, the meaning appears for certain people. For
other people the meaning never does appear.

"I never submitted it to
anybody, but it got spread some way or other. It's one of those
things that got completely out of control. I showed it to a few
friends and to a book salesman who came to see me. He liked the
thing because it had to do with words. I think I may have given
him a copy, and he must have given it to someone else. It first
appeared in print in the Merriam Company's magazine Word Study. I
think it got in Stars and Stripes (U.S. Army newspaper) because I
heard from people in Baghdad, Sweden, all over the world. Sports
Illustrated found it in another publication and gave me $1000 for
it. Arthur Godfrey found it in Sports Illustrated, and he
broadcast it and very generously told any readers that wanted a
copy they could have one by sending me postage. To my surprise, I
mailed about five thousand of them. After that episode, Prentice
Hall asked me to write a series of stories for a book, which I
did. (Anguish Languish was published by Prentice Hall in 1955.)

"The book sold fairly well
for that sort of thing. It went through four printings I think,
maybe 14,000 copies total.

"It's used now a good deal in
textbooks to demonstrate the phonetic structures of English. The
book has been used by some psychologist to determine the ability
of people to understand sound, to study the limit of distortion
that can be comprehended. That varies from person to person.

"People who like it best are
language people, teachers, lawyers, and doctors. That's almost
all the people who are interested in it. And children, strange to
say. I've had a lot of letters from them."

I asked him if it bothered him
that it is often printed without his name. He said, "Well,
it doesn't bother me, but it's just that if I had a cent for
every Xerox copy, I'd be much better off because I know it's been
copied by the thousands."

The book, Anguish Languish, is out
of print and very hard to find. Chase himself only has one copy.
Dover or somebody should reprint it.